English Phrasal Verbs Translation Into Russian and Finnish

The article represents a part of the research about English multi-word expressions and their translation equivalents in other languages. The research was important for different tasks such as language learning, translation, automatic multilingual lexicon, etc. The article is a short review of English phrasal verbs and their translations to Russian and Finnish. English phrasal verbs are multi-word expressions consisting of a verb and an adverbial particle with a spatial or locative meaning. The meaning of this combination doesn’t depend on the individual meanings of its parts. The most frequent phrasal verb pattern is any form of lexical verb plus prepositional adverb/particle, and usually, there can be a noun phrase, any pronoun, or an adverb embedded between the verb and the adverb/particle. Neither Russian nor Finnish has phrasal verbs. English-Russian If there is an English phrasal verb with an adverb or particle, which on its own is a function word like in, on, up, etc. , it is usually translated into Russian as a verb with prefix.

If a part of an English phrasal verb may act as a content word such as forward, behind, apart, together, etc. , the Russian translation is often a verb + adverb combination. However, some verbs of this group can be also expressed in Russian by prefixation, e. g. take apart. In addition, if an English phrasal verb is highly idiomatic, the Russian translation will be either idiomatic expression or a lengthy explanation. English-Finnish Many English phrasal verbs can be translated as single Finnish verbs, e. g. ake up – heart, herattaa; move ahead – data. There are also phrases and idiomatic combinations in Finnish, which can be used as translations of English phrasal verbs, e. g. find out – Saada Melville, switch off – kytkea pois pasta.

Sometimes we can use both techniques: hideaway – piilottaa, Panna piiloon, often the single-word expression is more formal. Often Finnish equivalent expressions and English phrasal verbs are morpho-syntactically close to each other, it is a result of influence from Swedish or other languages, e. g. : write down – kirjoittaa yours. There can be also more native Finnish expression like kirjoittaa muistiin. There are also fixed combinations with objects in Finnish to express English phrasal verbs, e.g.: tie up – sitoa kengannauhat. Conclusion English phrasal verbs usually have a single-word translation equivalent in Russian and Finnish. The balance between single-word and multi-word expressions changes across languages.

Reference

1. Mudraya, O. and Piao, S. and Lofberg, L. and Rayson, P. and Archer, D. (2005).
2. English-Russian-Finnish cross-language comparison of phrasal verb translation equivalents. In: Phraseology 2005, 2005-10-132005-10-15, Lovain-la-Neuve, Belgium.